The cool thing about DQ, though, is that it is set in the same universe as Runebound, a board game which I used to own WAY back in the early 2ks before my second gaming group (with Ancalagon and Captain Blood), split and scattered to the four winds. I'm pretty sure I bought Runebound from Plycon's, a game store that was owned by Tony Harrell. Tony, as it was, also happened to be my very first DM, whom I met my sophomore year of college, sometime in 1993. As I think I mentioned once before, Tony ran a homebrew campaign setting using AD&D 2nd Edition, in which the primary evil god was none other than a deity named Plycon.
With Tony graduating and getting a real job, wife, and kid, he stopped running his game. When that happened, running games for the next few years fell onto the shoulders of my buddy Scott, and myself. From then on, aside from our usual fare of AD&D 2e, we played everything from WFRP 1e to Marvel Super Heroes and Werewolf the Apocalypse to Call of Cthulhu. Weekends were spent on all-day gaming, or loading up and driving down to Orlando to hit up some of the big game shops and theme parks. Eventually though, as with Tony, other members of our group finished school and moved away, or just stopped playing in general. For me it happened around '96, I moved away, focused on other things.
That was the first big gaming "era" in my life.
The second, longer lasting era, started around the turn of the century and lasted for over a decade. I moved back to Valdosta in '99, moved in with my buddy Scott. At that time though, table-top gaming took something of a back seat. EverQuest, the online MMORPG had become a massive hit. Almost everyone I knew or hung out with at the time, was playing religiously, including me. Thankfully though, I never really gave up on pen-and-paper RPGs, even while playing EQ.
This was also around the time I met Ancalagon and some of his co-workers, we started running AD&D 2e again, with the occasional foray into 1e, WFRP 2e, Hackmaster, and even D&D 3e (because that was all the rage in the early part of the 2000s). The Adventure Zone was the only local game shop at the time and usually had a decent selection of games, but it really fell into decline in the 2ks. When I eventually found out about Tony's store, Plycon's became the place to be for both electronic LAN parties and table-top gaming. Through Plycon's our gaming group formed a small core group, with other revolving players either from the Air Force Base or the college.
What's funny about all of this, is that the post from FB showing off DungeonQuest is that it really brought back memories of the afternoons we spent playing Runebound. Runebound was a great game in which players adventured independently, moving characters around the board, completing quests, collecting items, and increasing power to be the first to rid the lands of great evil. There were a lot of expansion sets and add-on packs you could get. I don't know what happened to my original copy, I think it got lost in the move from Valdosta. Which is even more of a shame, since FFG no longer has it in-print. It would be nice to get it again and give it a run.
